I am working on a novel about life and death, tradition and modernity, wilderness and art. The protagonist griefs the death of a family member while isolating herself in the high desert of New Mexico. You can read the first page below:

A cheerful solitude is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. June’s father often told her this when they left for a camping trip together, the most recent of which was a three-day stay in the San Mateo Mountains about a hundred miles north of Las Cruces almost two years ago. Occasional removal from twenty-first-century claustrophobia helps to sift the significant matters from the husks of meaningless distractions. Such a parsing, a close examination of one’s life and the reasons for which we live, is a delicate process easily disturbed. Everyone must set some time apart, at least a few times a year, to take stock of their being, to see if they are still heading in the right direction or if the course of their life needs to be adjusted. The benefit of the American West is that such forays into solitude can be done in remote deserts and wild mountains, which is why June’s father decided to stay in New Mexico when he first visited as a young college student from France almost thirty years ago. But the nice thing about solitude, she remembered him adding with a smile, is that it can be experienced together. Now, one month shy of her twenty-seventh birthday, Juniper Dayan went into solitude alone.            
            She did not leave to detox from an overabundance of disruptive sensations nor the city noise, but rather to find if she still had the ability to discern feeling from experience. Her inability to react with the same annoyance to whatever might bother her was what drove June away from Las Cruces this time. Because what was annoyance, if not an indication of care? She desired most of all the opportunity to desire once again, to wish and chase and struggle. It was a dreadful numbness that weighed June down into her current stupor which led to her suspicion that not hell, but purgatory was the most frightful place one could be.